“Final Destination” — FWG Flash Fiction for 6/7/2025
- Rob Johnson
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
Mother Nature can be mischievous and unforgiving when we intrude on her wilderness.
The prompt is:
FINAL DESTINATION
Our Alaska cruise was the trip of a lifetime. Or, at least, it was supposed to be.
Stormy weather for the first two days kept everyone off the outside decks and, frankly, kept a lot of us holed up in our staterooms close to our bathrooms. It was so rough on the second day that they even closed the bars.
Docking in Juneau gave us a much needed respite, though, and Don and I were looking forward to our excursion on solid ground—a train ride up into the mountains. Imagine our delight when, as the train chugged up the winding mountain railway, we discovered that the storm, which generated twenty-foot waves out to sea, also gifted the mountain with the first snowfall of the season.
As we climbed away from the city, it was clear the storm wasn’t done with the mountain. I snuggled close to Don as the sprinkling of fairy dust became a coating clinging to every blade of grass and tree branch. When the snowfall turned from what, at home, we call a Nor’easter into a full-blown blizzard, I clutched Don’s hand. His returning squeeze wasn’t as reassuring as I had hoped.
The train slowed, and the engineer’s blast of the whistle—meant to clear the tracks of a herd of caribou—was ill-advised.
The avalanche started as a rumble felt before we heard it. By the time our brains processed the subsonic vibrations, it was too late to do anything but hold on to each other.
When the tumbling of our train car finally stopped, our broken bodies lay in pitch blackness, covered by a mountain’s worth of heavy snow. I clutched Don’s hand through it all, but his still fingers turned cold, and I knew I would soon join him in our final destination.
THE END
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